The war on drugs has failed: 'laws can be enforced to ridiculous lengths'

Reading Greg Campbell's excellent posts on medical marijuana here on dscriber made me recall a conversation I once had with a defence lawyer. It was about a police officer who had arrested someone for the grand-sounding offence of 'possession with intent to supply' cannabis. Drug dealing, in other words. I was checking the details to see if the case was worth following up on. It turned out the officer concerned had been a little over-zealous. He'd caught a teenage boy smoking a joint (possession) and passing it to his mate (supply).

The whole thing got dropped, of course, and the kids got off with a warning. But the case illustrated how sometimes, drug laws can be enforced to ridiculous lengths. A kid gets a criminal record for smoking a joint or popping a pill, but little is done - for whatever reason - about the big guys that smuggle the stuff wholesale and profit on it, often at the expense of destroyed lives. Of course there are successes, of course drugs are seized in large quantities (read this for a snapshot of what goes on in my back yard in Gibraltar). But ask any honest law enforcement officer who knows and they will tell you that for every tonne they stop, several more get through.

A while back I read an excellent article by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a former president of Brazil, and published in The Observer. In it, he had a simple, but brave and bold message: "It is time to admit the obvious," he wrote. "The 'war on drugs' has failed, at least in the way it has been waged so far."

He described how the drug war had ravaged communities in Latin America for decades, yet the continent remained the world's largest producer of cocaine and marijuana, and its gangs were expanding into heroin production and synthetic drugs. So much for the war on drugs.

"Continuing the drugs war with more of the same is ludicrous," Cardoso wrote. "What is needed is a serious debate that will lead to the adoption of more humane and more effective strategies to deal with the global drug problem."

To tackle the global drug problem, Cardoso said a different approach was needed, one that tackled the problem from the bottom up. Instead of repressing drug users, the focus should be on treatment and prevention. He advocated for decriminalisation, for tactics that differentiated between drug users and drug dealers, for strategies that reached out to users through education and support schemes, not punitive measures.

"To be credible and effective, decriminalisation must be combined with robust prevention campaigns. The profound drop in tobacco consumption in recent decades shows how public information and prevention campaigns can be effective when they are based on messages that are consistent with the experience of those they target," Cardoso wrote.

"No country has devised a comprehensive solution to the drug abuse challenge. And a solution need not be a stark choice between prohibition and legalisation. Alternative approaches are being tested and must be carefully reviewed. But it is clear that the way forward will involve a strategy of reaching out, patiently and persistently, to the users, and not the continued waging of a misguided and counterproductive war that makes the users, rather than the drug lords, the primary victims."

Whether or not you agree, the article was provocative and well worth a read. Any thoughts?

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Image: A  plane sprays herbicides over a suspected drug-growing operation in Colombia/government photo